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The Ferris Collection of Prints

The Museum’s Graphic Arts Collection, the oldest print-collecting unit in the Smithsonian, focuses on the technical and social history of printmaking to document how prints are made and used. Smithsonian art museums collect works on paper selected for aesthetic reasons, but the National Museum of American History (formerly the Museum of History and Technology) takes a broad view of visual culture.

Our prints illustrate technical developments and cultural changes. They represent all kinds of graphic works that have influenced American society. The collection has always included examples from many periods and countries, fine-art prints as well as popular and commercial graphic art, together with the plates, blocks, and tools used to produce prints. In 1996 the Museum presented an exhibition on 150 years of Smithsonian print collecting, Building a National Collection.

One of the largest print collections ever received by the Smithsonian was donated by the Ferris family between 1927 and 1932. Stephen James Ferris (1835–1915), a Philadelphia painter and etcher, collected over 2,000 European and American prints, both reproductive and original, representing old master and contemporary printmakers. The collection incorporated a variety of artistic subjects, compositions, and styles. Ferris may well have mined it for inspiration for his own work, but he was also deeply interested in art for its own sake. He and his family and friends would have simply enjoyed studying the images.

This lithograph, Passage de l’armé française à; l’hospice du Mont Saint-Bernard 15 Mai 1800 by Hippolyte Bellangé, shows Napoleon’s daring crossing of the Alps via the Great St. Bernard Pass on the Italian-Swiss border with his army of 40,000 men. It was published with eleven other military views, including the Battle of Marengo, in a portfolio. Entitled Souvenirs militaires de la Republique, du Consulat et de l’Empire (Military Memories of the Republic, the Consulate, and the Empire), the firm of Gihaut introduced the album in 1834. It was the last but one in an annual series that Bellangé inaugurated in 1823. The prints in these portfolios included military views and some genre scenes.

Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), an early European physician and professor of medicine, wrote an important treatise on the human body, published in 1543. He provided detailed illustrations that demonstrated muscle structure and other features of human anatomy, based on his work dissecting cadavers. Vesalius's work revolutionized the teaching of anatomy and remained influential for generations.

In Vesalius's time, dissection was discouraged by religious and cultural forces that misunderstood its potential contributions to science. Edouard Hamman's 1849 painting, reproduced as a lithograph by Adolphe Mouilleron in the early 1850s, suggests Vesalius's conscientious struggle with religion as he pursed his anatomical studies through dissection. He stands beside a cadaver laid out on the table, and his dissecting tools are at hand. He is pictured as if paused in thought, looking at a crucifix on the wall to his right. A skull and several large books suggest his research materials.

Lithography offered artists a medium for literally drawing on stone that was used for high-quality reproductive prints in 19th-century France. Mouilleron, an accomplished lithographer, was not only a superb draftsman, but it was said that in his hand the lithographic crayon took on the characteristics of color as used by painters. His larger prints, like this portrait of Vesalius, have rich tonal variations that convey the color values of the original painting in shades of black and white. Many American artists like Philadelphian Stephen J. Ferris (1835–1915), whose family donated this print to the Smithsonian, avidly collected and studied French prints of all periods.